Trump the Disrupter

Is America’s democratic system equal to the challenge of an authoritarian president?

March 30, 2016

The breakdown of democracy in Honduras
seven years ago materialized like a bankruptcy—slowly at first, then all at
once. Honduras’s democracy was only a quarter of a century old in 2005 when it
elected Manuel Zelaya, the son of a wealthy businessman, as the country’s
seventh president. When Zelaya’s agenda drifted in a populist direction, he
lost favor among the ruling class and the legislature turned against him.
Echoing an impasse now uncomfortably familiar to Americans, the Honduran
Congress rejected Zelaya’s Supreme Court nominees. Meanwhile, the country’s
working class rallied to his side.

In a parliamentary democracy, a figure like
Zelaya would have been replaced by a prime minister who enjoyed the support of
a majority of the legislature. But Honduras’s system of government is organized
much more like our own than those of countries like England and Israel, where
legislative and executive arms of the government are interwoven. Nearing the
end of his constitutionally limited four-year term, Zelaya organized a
referendum to test the public’s appetite for changing the constitution to allow
him to run for reelection. Sensing a power grab and fearing a popular
groundswell, the other branches of government balked, claiming Zelaya lacked
the authority to conduct such a survey and demanding that he desist. Zelaya
pressed ahead. “We will not obey the Supreme Court,” he told throngs of
Hondurans who’d gathered outside his offices to support him. “The court, which
only imparts justice for the powerful, the rich, and the bankers, only causes
problems for democracy.”

Zelaya ordered the military to fulfill
its obligation to assist in administering public elections. When the military
refused, the president fired the head of the armed forces, General Romeo
Vásquez Velásquez. “We are soldiers,” Vásquez said. “We have to comply with our
responsibilities.” Though the Supreme Court ordered Vásquez reinstated, Zelaya
continued resisting the legislature and the Court until eventually, by secret
order of the judiciary, he was placed under military arrest, allowing the
president of the National Congress to serve out the remainder of Zelaya’s term.

Though Honduran police, military forces,
and their supporters killed 20 people along the way, according to a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission report, this disorderly process went about as
smoothly as a coup can go. In late 2009, Honduras elected a new president and a
semblance of order was restored—a better outcome than what has befallen other
presidential democracies modeled after the world’s longest surviving one.

In the United States, our hope is that a
similar standoff will never arise—or that it would be resolved through existing
legal and constitutional processes before governing ceased and violence
erupted. But we’ve never had a serious aspirant to the presidency blithely
promise to trespass constitutional limits if confronted with resistance from
his or her power-sharing counterparts. Not, that is, until Donald Trump came
along.

It’s small wonder that Trump’s liberal
and conservative critics alike envision a Trump presidency as an endless
spectacle of recklessness and destruction. Trump has promised trade wars. He’s
made the mass expulsion of a nation’s worth of immigrants a central plank of
his campaign platform. He’s pledged to re-embrace torture and murder as
sanctioned anti-terrorism tools and said he would extend them extralegally to
the families of suspected terrorists.

It is uncomfortably easy to imagine
Trump issuing lawless orders that military leaders are unwilling to execute. It
is just as easy to imagine Trump firing generals and civilian officials who
resist him, and replacing them with apparatchiks. It is almost as easy
to imagine a sclerotic Congress finding itself unable to respond with
appropriate urgency.

Trump has certainly displayed
authoritarian tendencies. Confronted late last year with the fact that Vladimir
Putin kills journalists who challenge his power, Trump praised the Russian
president as “a leader” who (by contrast to President Obama) is “running his
country.” To the objection that killing journalists is not the American way,
Trump summoned his inner wiseguy—sprinkling a small dash of Michael Corleone
(“Who’s being naïve, Kay?”) over his own ribald political persona (“Someone’s
doing the raping!”): “I think that our country does plenty of killing, too,” he
said.

Trump has made it clear he’d consider
himself superior to Congress. Hours before polls closed on March 1—better known
to political junkies as Super Tuesday—House Speaker Paul Ryan, the most widely
respected elected official in the conservative movement, set aside his official
responsibilities to admonish Trump for playing coy with his appeal among white
supremacists. “If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party,
there can be no evasion,” said a visibly uncomfortable Ryan, frustrated in his
attempt to project seriousness by his boyish inflection and fidgeting. “They
must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”

Trump’s success could spark a cleansing fire in the GOP. The risk is that the conflagration might spread.

Ryan’s reprimand became a harbinger of
the kind of unprecedented crisis a determined demagogue might visit on our
political system. That night, after winning seven state primaries and finding
himself a couple of coin flips from the White House, Trump channeled his inner wiseguy
again in responding to the Speaker. “Look,” Trump said, barely concealing his
exasperation, “I don’t want to waste a lot of time. ... Paul Ryan, I don’t know
him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t,
he’s going to have to pay a big price, OK? OK.”

In one sense, this was vintage Trump,
prefacing intimidation and bullying with perfunctory pleasantries. (“I like
him, I get along with him very well,” he once said of rival candidate Ben
Carson, before comparing him to a child molester.) In another, bleaker sense,
it was a man aspiring to run our government heedlessly threatening the person
responsible for funding it. It was a candidate for president of the United
States hectoring the person who controls impeachment proceedings—long before
they’d ever have to govern together.

This is the stuff of constitutional
nightmares. The U.S. system hasn’t endured the level of stress that Trump’s
campaign has threatened to impose upon it since the civil rights era, or
perhaps the Civil War. It’s no surprise that huge swaths of both the left and
right are deeply worried about the stability of American democracy with Trump
at its helm.

But there are at least two ways that a
Trump presidency could unfold, and they bear almost no resemblance to one
another. An unrestrained, authoritarian Trump who attempted to bring Putinism
to the United States could precipitate a chaotic and potentially violent
constitutional crisis. By contrast, if he governs with more deference to
constitutional checks and balances than he’s shown so far, it’s possible to
envision Trump’s presidency—thanks to his departures from Republican
orthodoxy—easing some of the gridlock that has gripped our political system. To
the extent Trump’s candidacy holds out any promise for Democrats, it’s that his
success could spark a cleansing fire in the other party. The risk, of course,
is that the conflagration might spread.

If Trump were elected and governed as
he’s campaigned, would countervailing forces be able to contain him? Though
there are good reasons to think they would, the nightmare visions do not appear
to liberals and conservatives out of irrational panic. They stem from
fundamentally sound doubts about the nature and health of our political system.

The coup in Honduras, though relatively
bloodless, epitomized a form of disequilibrium—inherent to divided governments
like our own—that has frequently given way to juntas and oppression in
less-developed democracies. The theoretician who diagnosed this structural
instability as a primary source of political unrest in Latin America was Juan
Linz, a Yale political scientist whose famed 1990 essay, “The Perils of Presidentialism,”
has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years as a kind of Book of Revelation for a
debased American democracy.

Linz passed away on October 1, 2013—in a
poignant irony, amid a shutdown of the U.S. government. His ideas had been
coming into vogue among American political elites, who were seeing the systemic
dangers Linz had identified begin to play out in the legislative gridlock and
recurring crises inflicted on the country by uncompromising congressional
Republicans.

Parliamentary democracy is often
tumultuous, but like a slippery fault system, the turmoil tends to release
pent-up tension gradually, in regular small bursts, rather than catastrophically,
all of a sudden. To become prime minister, a politician needs to climb the
ranks through the system— a process that tends to weed out reactionaries and
radicals. To remain in power, a prime minister needs to nurture the respect of
the coalition that promoted her or him in the first place. Should the
parliament lose confidence in the prime minister, it selects another, or
parliament is dissolved and the country holds a general election.

Presidential systems impose no similarly
moderating influences on ambitious demagogues. Linz recognized that by forcing
two different, popularly elected branches of government to share power—like
twin princes fighting for the throne—presidential systems give rise to
legitimation crises almost by design. A few years before Linz died, this
observation was borne out dramatically by the consecutive U.S. elections of
2008 and 2010, when voters installed a Democratic president by a landslide,
then a Republican House of Representatives by another landslide. The question
of which branch of the government was the more legitimate voice of the people
pitted Congress and the White House against each other in dangerous
brinkmanship. Within months of the 2010 midterms, the government nearly ceased
functioning twice, the second time amid a threat by the GOP majority to
undermine the supposedly inviolable validity of U.S. debt.

That crisis, which courted global
economic calamity, was resolved at the last minute when President Obama largely
acceded to House Speaker John Boehner’s demands. But the episode raised an
alarming question: What happens when we have a president who refuses to be so
accommodating?

In the years since, we’ve experienced
several more symptoms of our perilous presidentialism, including the GOP’s
embrace of a kind of nullification via procedural extremism. By filibustering
key nominees, the party temporarily crippled regulatory agencies and briefly
commandeered the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second-most
powerful court, by blocking three Obama picks in an attempt to preserve its
conservative tilt.

The Obama era has been, in many ways, a
story of governing institutions devolving into a Hobbesian state of nature,
with raw power deployed by both Congress and the president to alter and restore
fragile balances between minority and majority parties, houses of Congress, and
branches of government. Congress now gleefully neglects its prerogative to
modify outdated or ill-devised laws, leaving it to the president to govern
through the use of legally dubious administrative kludges. When the news of
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death broke in February, astute
political observers knew the Republican Senate would never allow Obama to fill
the vacancy and flip the balance of the Court from right to left. One hour
later, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed this cynical intuition: “This
vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

When Linz wrote his essay, he didn’t
foresee that these kinds of standoffs, which had spelled doom for other presidential
systems, would arise here. In Linz’s original telling, the fact that the United
States had managed to exempt itself from constitutional crisis for over a
century was an odd but enduring idiosyncrasy. Like Einstein concocting the
theory of anti-gravity to rescue his more general theory from predicting the
collapse of a universe that everyone assumed to be static, Linz needed to
account for the fact the United States had escaped the dim fate his theory
prescribed. He chalked it up, in part, to a quirk in our system: We’d been
saved from such crises, he said, by “the uniquely diffuse character of American
political parties.”

That was 26 years ago, written as
President George H.W. Bush was partnering with Democrats to increase taxes—a
time when conservative Southern Democrats were still serving in Congress
alongside members of both parties who had, not long before, driven a corrupt
president from office without incident. Our system had spat out President
Richard Nixon as soon as it recognized the toxin. Countries like Honduras,
Chile, or Brazil might be vulnerable to the meddling of power-mad demagogues
and dictators, but in the United States of 1990, that threat seemed remote.

In the two decades between the
publication of “The Perils of Presidentialism” and Linz’s passing, Republicans
and Democrats completed their evolutions into ideologically disciplined
parties, with Democrats drifting slowly but steadily leftward and Republicans
making a mad dash to the right. As Linz’s theory predicted, polarization has
gridlocked our system, making it more prone to constitutional crisesthan
it has been in generations.

In the midst of these Obama-era shocks,
Linz reflected on his notion of American exceptionalism. “I initially thought
the United States was escaping the problem, because of the lack of discipline
in the parties, and the relatively good relationships among the legislators,”
he said in a 2013 interview with TheWashington Post. “Obviously
things have been changing. … I think there’s still enough political wisdom in
this country to avoid it, but obviously in many countries in Latin America and
other parts of the world a crisis like the debt ceiling would easily lead to a
military coup.”

It is no great stretch to interpret
Trump’s rise as a phenomenon driven by disgruntled masses abandoning democracy
in favor of autocracy—as part of the natural progression of Linzian decay. But
it’s also possible that American democracy really is unusually resistant to
systemic breakdown and can endure even the unprecedented challenges that Trump
could pose. Maybe, despite the potential for crisis that’s baked into our way
of governing, we can relieve these systemic tensions in other ways: through
party realignments, through sheer institutional robustness, or through popular
insistence that we uphold our constitutional traditions. In that more
optimistic light, Trump looks less like doom for the republic than doom for the
Republican Party.

If Trump were to govern with a more even
keel than he’s led us to expect, his presidency could conceivably serve as a
weird remedy to the constitutional problems we’re already experiencing—and end
up being powerful evidence of the political anti-gravity that keeps our
democracy from succumbing to ideological polarization.

The bleakest plausible capstones to a
Trump presidency are so very bleak because he has proven to be a shameless and
unpredictable candidate for the office. But it’s those same qualities that have
the potential to flatten American polarization by turning the political system
on its side. If Trump were to build his legacy of “greatness” through
compromise (or, rather, “deal-making”) instead of a will to power, he could
reverse America’s drift toward partisan polarization, and might even herald a
return to the kind of undisciplined, ideologically mixed parties that Linz saw
as critical to our system’s durability.

If Trump proved willing to operate
according to custom, his heterodoxy—combined with his zeal for negotiation and
personal triumph—might function as a turndown service for several strange
bedfellows. Trump’s critique of “free trade” could unite liberal and
conservative trade skeptics. While his anti-immigration extremism might upend
the bipartisan consensus for comprehensive reform, Trump would also force
opportunistic, pro-corporate immigration supporters on the right to choose
sides between the GOP’s nativist faction and liberal humanitarians—and would,
thus, drive an even larger share of the American professional class into the
Democratic Party, tilting it away from liberal orthodoxy.

Because Trump has consistently promised
his base of older voters to leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, his
presidency could also shatter the unified conservative opposition to the New
Deal consensus. And if there is a third way between the Republican Party’s
reflexive hatred of the Affordable Care Act and the popular view that every
American should have access to health care, Trump is the only candidate in
either party likely to forge it. No other figure would have the clout or the
flexibility to preserve a liberal health-coverage guarantee while reshaping our
insurance system dramatically enough that Republicans could claim to have
repealed and replaced Obamacare. This would create political détente on an
issue that has divided the parties for decades.

Even if Trump behaved as erratically in
office as he has on the campaign trail, he still might inspire new coalition-building
in Congress—just of a different sort. Imagine if the next president were
another Republican like George W. Bush and wanted to trample civil liberties,
torture suspected terrorists, and create new theaters of war with sketchy
funding and authorization. A Republican Congress would do nothing but enable
him—just as it did Bush.

By contrast, if President Trump were to
go rogue in all the ways he’s suggested, he would find himself tangled in a
vast net of constitutional resistance. Republicans would not be so deferential
to an anti-establishment figure like Trump if, after taking over their party,
he set about destroying its ideological underpinnings—propping up the welfare
state, for instance, and alienating the business class with protectionist trade
and restrictive immigration policies. Impeachment is our Constitution’s
ultimate remedy—one the Hondurans neglected to write into theirs before the
coup—but the founding document also gives Congress control of the national
treasury. If Trump bowled over constitutional barriers, a bipartisan coalition
of Democrats and Republican Trump rejectionists could deauthorize or defund
different facets of his agenda—such as, for instance, a campaign of mass
expulsion of unauthorized immigrants. Courts would constrain him as well.
Lacking the power to co-opt legislative leaders and judges, Trump would have to
adapt or die.

This is one reason why, for all the
understandable alarm about the twilight of the republic, the Trump saga has
unfolded as the story of a party, rather than a nation, on the brink of
collapse. If Trump becomes president, it will either be by building a new
coalition for the GOP or by radically altering the balance of factional power
in the existing one. Once the election was behind him, he would turn from a
campaign world dominated by rhetoric and strategy—and popular entertainment—to
governing, a realm in which norms and laws have much greater conforming power.

Trump’s ability to break the Republican
Party in half is playing out before our eyes, as is his power to stir up ugly
forces in the body politic. His desire to lay the Constitution to waste will
only be tested if he’s sworn into office next January.

The Republicans most committed to
stopping Trump from being elected are, generally speaking, the same folks who
have convinced themselves that everything about their party was just fine until
Trump came along. They are wrong about this, but their very wrongness is what
gives me hope that Linz may have been right, after all, about America’s
peculiar resistance to constitutional crisis.

My suspicion is that Trump is mostly a
symptom of rot at the nexus of movement conservatism and Republican
politics—not, by and large, of some broader national decadence. While the
American government might not be entirely immune to the perils of presidentialism,
it may well be riddled through with enough complexity and redundancy to make
realignment more likely than collapse. The lesson of Trump’s candidacy—and,
perhaps, his presidency—is not, then, that a corrupted party like the GOP will
eventually take the country down with it, but that it will eventually eat
itself alive and be replaced with something altogether more wieldy.

George W. Bush, who
so successfully pushed past the limits of presidential powers, wasn’t unbound
by norms and checks in a vacuum. He benefited from a deeply complicit Congress
and a conservative judiciary. Any of the non-Trump Republican candidates in
this cycle would be given the same latitude if elected. The real danger to our
system may not be that disrupters like Trump will emerge and demolish existing
political coalitions, but that they won’t. Without disruption, our parties will
be free to stray further down their paths of polarization—until the kinds of
crises that defined the past seven years confront leaders who are less
responsible than Obama or more reckless than Boehner, and our Linzian fate
overtakes us.

Brian Beutler is a senior editor at The New Republic. He hosts Primary Concerns, a podcast about politics.